The ongoing development, maintenance and expansion of network-based systems often involves providing an increasing number of cloud services to users to allow them access to increased functionality. Authentication and authorization systems are increasingly being used to ensure that only users authorized to access each cloud service do so. However, these systems suffer from various drawbacks, such as not being scalable as the number of users and/or cloud services increases.
As the number of cloud services increases, authentication tokens provided by a cloud-based access management system correspondingly increase in size, presenting problems with storing the tokens and/or repeatedly transmitting the tokens over the network to various cloud service providers. Further, many implementations lack sufficient security mechanisms to ensure that only users authorized to access each cloud service do so. In some implementations, encryption of the token provides a measure of security, but increases the size of the token, further exacerbating the problems of storing and/or transmitting the token.
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